the cataract in the district of the temple of Isis, and under the
shadow of the only Egyptian sanctuary in which the heathen cultus was
kept up, and that publicly, as late as in his youth. Since Theodosius the
Great, one emperor and one Praefectus Augustalis after another had sent
foot-soldiers and cavalry above the falls to put an end to idolatry in
the beautiful isle; but they had always been routed or destroyed by the
brave Blemmyes who haunted the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea.
These restless nomad tribes acknowledged the Isis of Philae as their
tutelary goddess, and, by a very ancient agreement, the image of their
patroness was carried every year by her priests in a solemn procession to
the Blemmyes, and then remained for a few weeks in their keeping.
Horapollo's father was the last of the horoscope readers, and his
grandfather had been the last high-priest of the Isis of Philae. His
childhood had been passed on the island but then a Byzantine legion had
succeeded in beating the Blemmyes, in investing the island, and in
plundering and closing the temple. The priests of Isis escaped the
imperial raid and Horapollo had spent all his early years with his
father, his grandfather, and two younger sisters, in constant peril and
flight. His youthful spirit was unremittingly fed with hatred of the
persecutors, the cruel contemners and exterminators of the faith of his
forefathers; and this hatred rose to irreconcilable bitterness after the
massacre at Antioch where the imperial soldiery fell upon all his family,
and his grandfather and two innocent sisters were murdered. These horrors
were committed at the instigation of the Bishop, who denounced the
Egyptian strangers as idolaters, and to whom the Roman prefect, a proud
and haughty patrician, had readily lent the support of an armed force. It
was owing to the narrowest chance--or, as the old man would have it, to
the interposition of great Isis, that his father had been so happy as to
get away with him and the treasures he had brought from the temple at
Philae. Thus they had means to enable them to travel farther under an
assumed name, and they finally settled in Alexandria. Here the persecuted
youth changed his name, Horus, to its Greek equivalent, and henceforth he
was known at home and in the schools as Apollo. He was highly gifted by
nature, and availed himself with the utmost zeal of the means of learning
that abounded in Alexandria; he labored indefatigably a